A Journal of the Central Plains Volume 37, Number 3 | Autumn 2014

Kansas History

A Journal of the Central Plains

Volume 37, Number 3

|

Autumn 2014

A collaboration of the Kansas Historical Foundation and the Department of History at Kansas State University

A Show of Patriotism

German American Farmers, Marion County, June 9, 1918.

When the United States formally declared war against

Onaga. There are enough patriotic citizens of the neighborhood to enforce the order and they promise to do it." Wamego mayor Floyd Funnell declared, "We can't hope to change the heart of the Hun but we can and will change his actions and his words." Like-minded Kansans circulated petitions to protest schools that offered German language classes and churches that delivered sermons in German, while less peaceful protestors threatened accused enemy aliens with mob violence. In 1918 in Marion County, home to a thriving Mennonite community, this group

of German American farmers posed before their tractor and

threshing machinery with a large American ﬂag in an attempt to prove their patriotism with a public display of loyalty. In

the midst of a nationwide backlash against their heritage and

culture, these farmers might not have been responding to a speciﬁc threat, but it may not have been a coincidence that the nearby Mennonite-afﬁliated T a bor College was burned to the ground in April 1918.

Germany on April 6, 1917, many Americans believed that the

war involved both the battleﬁeld in Europe and a ﬁght against disloyal German Americans at home. Zealous patriots who

considered German Americans to be enemy sympathizers, spies, or slackers demanded proof that immigrants were “100

percent American.” Across the country, but especially in the

Midwest, where many German settlers had formed close-

knit communities, the public pressured schools, colleges, and churches to discontinue the use of the German language. Local newspapers published the names of "disloyalists" and listed

their offenses: speaking German, neglecting to donate to the

Red Cross, declining to buy liberty bonds, resisting the draft, or refusing to ﬂy an American ﬂag. A Kansas City Star article published on June 9, 1918, warned German Americans in the small Pottawatomie County town of Onaga that "word has gone out the German language is not to be spoken on the streets of

Kansas History

A Journal of the Central Plains

Volume 37, Number 3

|

Autumn 2014

Suzanne E. Orr

Interim Managing Editor

Language and Loyalty:

The First World War and German Instruction at Two Kansas Schools

by Justine Greve

130 148 164

Virgil W. Dean

Consulting Editor

Derek S. Hoff

Book Review Editor

Microcosm of Manhood:

Abilene, Eisenhower, and Nineteenth-Century Male Identity

by Peter M. Nadeau

p. 130 p. 148 p. 164

Katherine Goerl Daniel T. Gresham

Editorial Assistants

Editorial Advisory Board

Thomas Fox Averill Donald L. Fixico Kenneth M. Hamilton David A. Haury

M.H. Hoeﬂich

Thomas D. Isern

The Early Life and Career of Topeka’s Mike Torrez, 1946–1978:

Sport as Means for Studying Latino/a Life in Kansas

James N. Leiker Bonnie Lynn-Sherow Patricia A. Michaelis Jay M. Price Pamela Riney-Kehrberg Kim Carey Warren

by Jorge Iber

Cover: “Mike T o rrez,” Courtesy of the Oakland

Athletics. Back Cover:

"Fire on the Hill," Watercolor by Samuel J.

Reader.

Under Moonlight in Missouri: 180

Private John Benton Hart’s Account of Price’s Raid, October 1864

edited by John Hart

Reviews

200

207

Printed by Allen Press, Lawrence, Kansas.

Book Notes

p. 180

Courtesy of Baker University and Kansas United Methodist Archives, Baldwin City, Kansas.

Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains 37 (Autumn 2014): 130–147

130

Kansas History

Language and Loyalty:

The First World War and German Instruction at Two Kansas Schools

by Justine Greve

wave of patriotism broke across the country when the United States entered the First World War inApril 1917. In addition to joining the Red Cross, buying liberty bonds, or planting victory gardens, some citizens asserted their patriotism by burning German books, removing German composers from symphony programs, and

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re-naming Rubella “liberty measles.”¹The anti-German sentiment also had a more violent side. Those deemed “too German” faced ridicule, threats, accusations of disloyalty or espionage, and sometimes physical harm. In response to such attitudes many German immigrants made efforts to Americanize. Many stopped speaking German both in public and at home. Teaching or learning German as a second language could also raise suspicions, and this wartime anti-Germanism had a devastating effect on German language and literature departments in American colleges and universities.
Scholars such as Frederick Luebke, LaVern Rippley, Don Tolzman, and Carl Wittke have detailed the harsh treatment of German Americans during World War I without much attention to the way university foreign language programs handled the new Germanophobia.²Post-secondary institutions were not as likely to ban the “Hun language” as elementary or high schools, but academia was nonetheless affected by the popular association of German speaking with national disloyalty. Schools that saw a decline in German enrollment were public as well as private, religious as well as

Justine Greve graduated from Baker University with a bachelor’s degree in history, German, and English. In 2013 she completed her master’s degree in
American studies at the University of Kansas. Her overarching research interests include American history and religion in the early twentieth century.
The author wishes to thank John Richards and the anonymous readers at Kansas History for their thoughtful comments on previous drafts of this article.

1. Terrence G. Wiley, “The Imposition of World War I Era English-Only Policies and the Fate of German in North America,” in Language and Politics in the United States and Canada: Myths and Realities, ed. Thomas Ricento and Barbara Burnaby (Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1998), 223, 231; Barbara Tischler, “One Hundred Percent Americanism and Music in Boston during World War I,” American Music 4 (Summer 1986): 164; LaVern J. Rippley, The German-Americans (1976; reprint, Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1984), 186.
2. Frederick Luebke, Bonds of Loyalty: German Americans and World War I (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974); LaVern J. Rippley, The
German-Americans (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1976); Don H. Tolzmann, German Americans in the World Wars (München: K.G. Saur, 1995); and Carl Wittke, The German-Language Press in America (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1957).

Language and Loyalty

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secular, “100 percent American” as well as German. Though the phenomenon as a whole can be super-

ﬁcially explained as “patriotism,” this tells us little about the speciﬁc

reasons schools shied away from the language. A closer look at the elimination of German in two Kansas institutions indicates that the motives varied with individual schools’ circumstances. In many cases—at least, on the surface—rejecting German classes, clubs, and culture was a voluntary statement of national allegiance, either on the part of the administration or the student body. At Baker University in Baldwin City, Kansas, prowar enthusiasm was coupled with an anti-German sentiment, likely fueled by the highly respected and Germanophobic William Alfred Quayle, a Methodist bishop and former president of the university. As a result, students at

Baker abandoned German as a ﬁeld

of study. At Bethel College in North Newton, the “patriotic” elimination of the German language was driven in part by fear and the school’s perceived need to prove its national loyalty. Experience with anti-Ger-

manism and anti-paciﬁsm caused the Mennonite-afﬁliated institution

to drop German, hoping to establish a patriotic image for its students and staff—members of a group that otherwise appeared subversive.

This lithograph, printed in the New York Herald on April 12, 1917, shows a searchlight

scanning a marching crowd of German Americans, depicted stereotypically as portly men with

handlebar mustaches and long pipes. The U.S. government classiﬁed hundreds of thousands of German American men as “enemy aliens” during World War I, leaving them vulnerable to searches, property seizure, and even internment. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and

Photographs Division, Washington, D.C

aker and Bethel represent two models of the “patriotic” rejection of German:

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one apparently lighthearted and the other involuntary. Yet as with most binary categories, the distinction is not actually so clear-cut. Any resident of the U.S. is under the gaze of Uncle Sam and, in a national crisis situation, likely aware of his or her own performance of patriotism. Though certain behaviors are more dangerous and certain people more closely watched than others, all people must police themselves. Thus it is necessary not only to recognize oppression and privilege, but also to rethink the motives of the patriots who seem to have given up German so easily and pressured their neighbors to do the same. With their own claim to American authenticity on the line, xenophobia may have felt for some like the best—even a necessary—option.

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Kansas History

he First World War was not the ﬁrst time in

American history that German speakers had been ill-treated. In the mid-1800s, religious differences and a rise in nativism created tension many students refused to enroll in German classes. In 1915 about a quarter of high school students studied German; by 1922 that number was at less than 1 percent. The

Newton Weekly Kansan-Republican reported in 1918 that in

Kansas, “all high schools and academies have eliminated the language, and practically all elementary schools have done likewise.” Such an inclusive report seems extreme but may not have been far off. Historian Arlyn John Parish agrees that by 1918, “practically all schools substituted other courses for German.”⁵

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between (often Catholic) Germans and the English-speaking Protestant majority. Nativists’ primary concern was that teaching immigrant school children in their native language hindered the process of assimilation. Instruction of German as a second language does not seem to have been a subject of concern; the problem was not with the German language itself, but the obstinate foreignness some Americans attributed to its immigrant speakers.³
This reluctance to assimilate took on a more serious meaning in 1914, as many German Americans supported their former country while most of the American public fell behind England and France. In 1917 the countries

became ofﬁcial enemies, and loyal American citizens

branded German the language of the Hun. No longer merely a sign of laziness, German speaking could be the mark of subversion. According to historian Terrence Wi-

ley, around 18,000 people across the Midwest “were ﬁned

for language violations” during this era. Punishments fre-

quently went far beyond ﬁnes—to arrests, threats, beat-

ings, or even lynchings—when language violations coupled with lack of support for the war effort. In Worden, Kansas, for example, three men tarred a Lutheran pastor for refusing to preach in English or in support of the war.⁴
Though language was always a factor in anti-German sentiment, the linguistic aspect of the campaign was primarily focused on the elimination of German in schools. Americans viewed education as an important force both in assimilation and in the war effort. Many educators (and, indeed, the National Education Association) opposed German language instruction in American classrooms. Though the efforts were concentrated on the elementary grades, German was also eliminated from many high schools and some colleges. A March 1918 survey indicated that 15 percent of American secondary schools had eliminated German from their curricula. The change was particularly pronounced in certain areas. Prior to the war, 96 percent of high schools in Michigan offered German; by 1920 that number had decreased to less than 8 percent. Even when the language was not actually eliminated,
The story of German instruction at the university level is somewhat harder to trace. Clearly, German teaching raised suspicions at some institutions. In 1918 six members of the German faculty at the University of Michigan were removed on charges of disloyalty—their subject matter apparently grounds for dismissal.⁶In Kansas, some schools (such as Bethel College and Fort Hays Kansas Normal School) eliminated German outright. Others, such as Baker and the University of Kansas, kept German classes on the books, even as students refused to enroll.
Persecution of German speakers and discouragement of all things German came in forms ranging from presidential edicts to glances from neighbors or instances of vigilante violence. In Kansas, non-naturalized German immigrants were required to obtain permits in order to enter certain parts of the capital city. Governor Arthur

Capper kept a “slackers ﬁle,” which contained correspon-

dence regarding possible German subversives. On the more local level, groups like the Barton County “Night Riders” set about “to clean up the county of German spies, German sympathizers and dirty slackers.”⁷The threats and actions of “loyalty leagues” and other selfappointed patriots were most common in areas highly populated by German immigrants but were certainly not limited to them. Indeed, “there was hardly a community in the United States,” writes Carl Wittke in his study of

5. Arlyn John Parish, “Kansas Mennonites during World War I,” Fort

Hays Studies––New Series: History Series (May 1968): 53; “Bethel Takes a

Sweeping Step,” Newton Weekly Kansan-Republican, September 18, 1918,

3; see also Wiley, “The Imposition of World War I Era English-Only Policies,” 226, 229.
6. Wiley, “The Imposition of World War I Era English-Only Policies,”
222; Clifford Wilcox, “World War I and the Attack on Professors of German at the University of Michigan,” History of Education Quarterly 33 (Spring 1993): 59–84. Wilcox notes that these professors were primarily “singled out . . . for ideological reasons” rather than ethnicity (several were of German descent). The university defended two other ethnically German professors against alumni who called for their removal (p. 62).
7. “Disloyalists are warned,” Inman Review, April 26, 1918, Kansas
Memory Database, item #213538, www.kansasmemory.org; “Governor
3. Wiley, “The Imposition of World War I Era English-Only Policies,”
214, 216.
4. Ibid., 220, 223; “Preacher given coat of tar by strangers,” T o peka
(Kans.) Daily Capital, May 10, 1918, Kansas Memory Database, item #213502, www.kansasmemory.org.

133

Figure 1. Although this map shows that Pottawatomie County contained only four German settlements, the Kansas City Star in June 1918 condemned it as “the most disloyal county in the state.” The article listed the offenses of alleged enemy aliens from throughout the county, including Wamego resident Louis B. Leach's crime of refusing to give to the Red Cross. Although he “subscribed heavily” to the Liberty Loan, he found the sidewalk of his home branded with a cross in yellow paint. When Leach told a committee of patriots, “ Y o u can tar and feather me, or even kill me, I won't give a cent,” vandals painted his car with crosses and the word “Slacker.” Map originally published in J. Neale Carman, ForeignLanguage Units of Kansas I. Historical Atlas and Statistics (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1962), 46. Courtesy of the University Press of Kansas.

the German-language press, “which did not have a ‘Security League,’ ‘Loyalty League,’ ‘Citizens’ Patriotic League,’ or some other volunteer vigilante organization which specialized in hunting German spies.”⁸Tarring and featherings took place in the highly German McPherson County, but also in the more “American” Douglas County. The Kansas City Star declared Pottawatomie County “the most disloyal county in the state” (“dotted with slackers and disloyalists”), though it contained relatively few German settlements (see Figure 1). Of course, the “100 percent Americans” of the area

Arthur Capper’s slackers ﬁle,” General Correspondence, folder 11, box 36, Arthur Capper Administration, Records of the Governor’s Ofﬁce,

State Archives Division, Kansas Historical Society, Topeka; Kansas Memory Database, item #212615, www.kansasmemory.org; “All alien enemies liable to arrest,” T o peka Daily Capital, June 19, 1917; “Watch

enemy women,” T o peka Daily Capital, September 19, 1918.

8. Wittke, The German-Language Press in America, 268.

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Kansas History

In 1916 Baker University’s German club, Die Lustigen Deutschen, numbered twenty-three members, as shown in this photo from the university’s yearbook. The student newspaper, the Baker Orange, reported the club's activities regularly; the club held biweekly meetings, hosted a yearly program of skits and traditional German songs, and organized events such as picnics for members. By 1919 the club had not been mentioned in the Orange for two years, and the yearbook's cartoonist concluded that German at Baker was all but forbidden. Courtesy of Baker University and Kansas United Methodist Archives, Baldwin City, Kansas.

were working hard to correct this with threats, yellow paint, and tar.⁹Nowhere was a German speaker completely safe. man ruling lineage, was both a literary society and one of the rotating names for Baker graduating classes. Course catalogs from this period listed thirteen semester-length German courses. Though prewar yearbooks did not list seniors’ courses of study, the large number of German club members (all of whom had at least two years of German experience) and class offerings suggests that several students each year graduated with a major or minor in German.¹⁰or most students at Baker University, German was a second language and foreign culture. But before the U.S. entered World War I, German was a popu-

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lar interest. The school had an active and vibrant
German club—Die Lustigen Deutschen—with twenty-three members, biweekly meetings, and an annual program of German songs and skits. The “House of Hanover,” a Ger-

D. Keel, “Deitsch, Däätsch, Düütsch, and Dietsch: The Varieties of Kansas German Dialects after 150 Years of German Group Settlement in Kansas,” Department of German Languages and Literature, University of Kansas, at http://www2.ku.edu/~germanic/LAKGD/William_ Keel_Essay.shtml.
9. “Preacher given coat of tar by strangers,” T o peka Daily Capital, May
10, 1918; “Use tar and feathers,” McPherson Daily Republican, April 23, 1918, Kansas Memory Database, item #213529, www.kansasmemory.org; “On trail of disloyalty,” Kansas City Star, June 9, 1918, Kansas Memory Database, item #213516, www.kansasmemory.org. See also William
10. “Die Lustigen Deutschen,” in Orange Blossoms (Baldwin City,
Kans.: Baker University, 1916), 138.

135

change in attitudes toward Germany. A political cartoon in the 1919 yearbook illustrated the fate of German language and culture at Baker. The cartoon depicted two Germans discussing the boarded-up “German Club” building. When one asked the reason for the closure, the other explained, “Because, in der Baker University all tings vot haf der Cherman label or der limburger schmell iss verboten” (see Figure 2). Indeed, reports of German Club activities disappeared from the Orange around the time of U.S. entry into the war. The paper reported on a German club picnic in October 1917—the week

after the inﬂuential Bishop Quayle gave his ﬁrst campus speech decrying

the use of the German language.¹²After that activity, no more articles about German club activities appeared in the Orange, even though the press continued to cover other campus groups (including language clubs).

Figure 2. This political cartoon, published in the Baker University Yearbook in 1919, comments upon the gradual elimination of "all tings vot haf der Cherman label" from the university. Although the cartoon suggests German cultural activities and classes were ofﬁcially verboten, the cartoonist was not entirely accurate. In fact, President Lough decided in May 1918 not to discontinue Baker University's language program despite pressure from “several sources” to do so. Courtesy of Baker University and Kansas United Methodist Archives, Baldwin City, Kansas.

In 1918 the senior class (the “House of Hanover”) decided to follow the lead of the English crown and change its name to the “House of Winsor [sic]. ” The 1919 yearbook explained the change: “In 1914 came the Great World War, and during those years the Ruling House of Germany carried on a war so ruthless that her name will forever be marked as the blackest in history.” In response, students decided “that the name of Hanover should forever be discarded.”¹³Unsurprisingly, none of the members of that class graduated with a major or minor in German. In fact, as of December 1919, the president reported the retirement of the former German professor, noting that no one at Baker had taken a German class in two years.¹⁴s at other schools across the country, patriotic fervor overtook Baker once Congress declared